Hallowed

“Christian,” someone yells from by the lake. “I thought we were going to water-ski?”

“Maybe later,” he calls back, waving. He stops in front of us. “Hey, Clara. Angela.” His gaze swings to Angela briefly before coming back to me. “Jeffrey here, too?” I look around but can’t see Jeffrey.

“Yep, we’re all accounted for,” says Angela. “The Angel Club has arrived. Isn’t this crazy?”

“Right. Crazy. I guess.” He shrugs.

“Don’t tell me, this is old news for you. You knew about all of this before, didn’t you?” Angela asks.

He grabs a potato chip off her plate and tosses it in his mouth, crunching it loudly.

Angela glares at him, then sniffs and stalks off across the grass toward Billy and Mom.

Christian raises an eyebrow at me. “What’d I do?”

“Dude,” I say with a smile. “You are in so much trouble.” Later, after we watch the most spectacular sunset I’ve ever witnessed that wasn’t in a movie, Christian helps me set up the tent that Angela and I are supposed to share tonight. Angela, predictably, is nowhere to be found. She didn’t even bother to retrieve her pack from the edge of the meadow. Christian and I lug both packs over to the campsite, pick out a space, and start pitching like crazy. We have to hurry because soon it will be too dark to set everything up, but it’s no problem, really. Christian seems to have done this tent thing a hundred times before.

“So,” I ask him as he’s pounding in the tent pegs, the final step in the process. “How long have you known about this place?”

He shifts to work on another peg. “My uncle brought me up here last May. I was pretty surprised by the whole thing, too, believe me. Before that I had no idea.”

“So you really were camping with your uncle,” I muse, finally putting two and two together. “And here I thought. .” I stop myself.

He stops hammering to look at me. “You thought what?”

“Oh, nothing. I thought it was an excuse so you could skip. Because of—”

“Kay,” he finishes for me. “You thought I skipped school to dodge Kay.”

“I guess so.”

He starts hammering again. “Nope. But it was because of her, in a way. When I broke up with Kay, my uncle saw that as a sign that I was getting serious about my purpose. So he said it was time. He brought me up here, and we spent the week flying, training, meditating, all that, and then on the weekend the congregation showed up.”

What made my mom decide it was time to bring us here? I wonder. “Did you see my mom?” I ask, because even though she hasn’t been up front with the angel info, part of me still can’t believe that she was involved with all of this and never told me.

“No. I heard some people mention a Maggie,” he answers, “but I didn’t know who she was.”

“Oh.” Suddenly I realize that I’ve pretty much been peppering him with questions for the past half hour, and he’s done most of the work putting up the tent.

“You must think I’m an idiot,” he says then.

I look up, startled. There are a lot of words I’d use to describe Christian Prescott: mystery, enigma, conundrum, destiny, terrifying, and, well, just plain hot, if I’m being honest, but the word idiot has never crossed my mind. Except maybe that one time at prom. “Idiot?”

“Because all the signs were there, pointing to you being the girl from my vision, you being an angel-blood, and I never figured it out. If I’d only figured it out sooner, maybe. .,” he trails off.

I swallow. “What signs?”

“I always felt like there was something different about you, even the first time I saw you,” he says.

“You mean when I passed out in the hall? I guess I must have seemed different, all right.”

“I hadn’t had my vision yet,” he says. He sits back in the grass. “I thought I did something bad to you, and that’s why you passed out.”

“Something bad to me?”

“With my mind.”

“Like your talking-in-my-head thing.”

He starts picking at the grass, pulling on tufts and smoothing it between his fingers. “I didn’t know how to control it yet,” he says.

“Have you always been able to do that? Talk in people’s heads?”

“It started last year, right before you showed up, actually. I still can’t do it with everybody.

I can pick up what people are thinking, and sometimes I can send thoughts back, but I think the person has to be able to receive them, too.”

“So that day in the hall, you talked to me?”

“I tried to.”

“What did you say?” I ask.

“I said. . hello.”

“And then I. .”

“Then you dropped to the floor like I’d hit you over the head with a baseball bat.” I groan at what a graceful